British Library Labs Roadshow
The British Library Labs Roadshow came to Edinburgh on Friday 26 February 2016, showing off some of the work that researchers have conducted using the British Library’s Digital Collections.
Nicola Osborne of EDINA kept an incredibly detailed live blog on the day; readers seeking more details are encouraged to read it.
The BL Labs’ Competitions and Awards are worthy of particular attention.
- Competitions are for transformative project ideas using the Digital Collections – two finalists are selected to work ‘in residence’ with the BL Labs team. The winner will receive £3000 and the runner-up £1000. The deadline for the current competition is midnight on 11th April.
- Awards recognise outstanding work which has been carried out using the collections across four areas. The winner in each area will receive £500, the runner-up £100. The deadline for entering is midnight on 5th September.
There were a number of entertaining highlights. Adam Crymble was the 2015 Competition winner for his Crowdsource Arcade:
An ex-Pixar animator has automatically animated images from the BL’s collection on Flickr:
Bob Nicholson, of Edgehill University, runs a Twitter account showcasing Victorian jokes mined from BL materials. The jokes are found algorithmically, but it still needs a human to determine which are funny enough for publication (the bar is necessarily low):
.@benosteen talking about the fab @VictorianHumour project #bldigital < Jokes are *awful* but I love this project pic.twitter.com/N6a5wJxu8l
— Lorna M. Campbell (@LornaMCampbell) February 26, 2016
The LitLong:Edinburgh project has used text mining and georeferencing on a large selection of texts (from the BL and elsewhere) to create a database and map of the Edinburgh place names appearing in those texts. The University of St Andrews SACHI Research Group is one of the partners on this project. Take a look at the data on the project website or download the mobile app.
These are just a few highlights – check out Nicola’s live blog for more details of the event and the BL Labs’ pages for more examples of the work being done with the Digital Collections.